While most 14-year-old girls worry about school, exams, their changing looks and their new crushes, this girl of the same age, in Agra, has already decided to give up on her life and take ‘samadhi’ – a form of intense meditation resulting in conscious departure of life, from her physical body.
While locals flocked to her house to offer her milk and gaangajal, to anoint her body before this final stage, it remains for the district administration now and a team of health officials to prevent her from killing herself.
In an extreme manifestation of the bizzare child worship superstitions practiced in India, one girl has lived out a most dysfunctional childhood that is now ending in suicide, and she is being worshipped for it by the locals and loudly declaimed as god.
When she was six years old, her father spread the word that this little girl was allegedly ‘undertaking a fast’ to pray to the gods for rain. When it rained, this girl became a goddess overnight. It didn’t stop there. By the time she was eight years old, the girl had given up on solid food and stopped talking altogether because she began a maun vrat – vow of silence. Today at the age of 14, the girl has not talked to anybody or eaten solid food for six years.
Her parents report that she communicated on a piece of paper that she wished to attain samadhi. It’s a mark of the extent of our susperstitions that nobody thinks it odd or dysfunctional that a young child hasn’t spoken for years. What kind of permanent damage to the body would a perennial liquid diet in so young a child have caused?
Little wonder that the girl herself has bought into the theory. “I am a goddess. Do not ask me unnecessary questions,” she said in a reply to a question by Mail Today.
And this isn’t the first time that people have gone overboard with using children in rituals either. In Tamil Nadu, the annual Mariamman festival, which celebrates a local goddess, uses many young girls, less than 10 years of age as reincarnation of the goddess. As a part of that ritual, these little girls are dressed up as goddesses and here’s the tragic part, their cheeks are pierced with hot steel rods, resembling miniature tridents. The sight of these little girls, tears running down their face, eyes dulled in pain is hard to watch – and all in the name of rituals.
Image via cohn17.com
In Punjab, a 14-year-old teenager, Arshid Ali Khan, can barely walk thanks to a seven-inch tail sticking from his spine. Doctors have warned him that he may be paralysed if he does not get it surgically removed at the earliest. But the teenager and his family are in no hurry because thanks to the tail, the boy is now being worshipped as reincarnation of monkey god, Hanuman.
Perhaps the most bizzare of them all when a dead baby in Balrampur, Uttar Pradesh, was worshipped for more than a week as a goddess. This baby died half an hour after it’s birth and was born with a black face although pigmentation on the rest of the body was normal. So what must the villagers do but worship this black-faced dead baby as a reincarnation of goddess Kali, long after the body had begun to decay and smell.
And there is this strange practice in parts of Karnataka and Maharashtra, where babies are thrown from a height of 50 feet as part of a ritual, while men (read devotees) wait below, holding bedsheets to catch the falling babies. There is no end to ritual cruelty. And clearly, education has no effect on most of us, we continue to cling to superstition – unable to differentiate between faith to god and cruelty in the name of god.
Perhaps instead of saving the children from the Godless ones, it’s more important to save them from the God-fearing ones.
Image Courtesy: BCCL
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